I'm asking here because this is about loan repayment by grads. Feel free to move it, mods.

The income-based repayment application asks if my income has changed significantly from last year's return. It has, because last year I was in school and now I have a job. So the first option is to provide a pay stub. I assume it will extrapolate out for the annual income using that pay stub and base the loan repayment on that.

The second option is to wait until I file this year's return in January 2018, and then use that as a basis for the loan repayment. I assume this will be a lower repayment figure because I have only been working since the fall, so the annual income will be relatively low. But I'm not sure if this will be too late to apply considering repayment starts in January.

Ideally I would have applied before I got the job to lock in the super-poor income, but I don't think that was possible so early.